Alfred Tarski Quotes
Alfred Tarski was a Polish-American logician, mathematician, and philosopher and one of the founders of modern mathematical logic and model theory. After his early career in the Lwow-Warsaw school of analytic philosophy, he was stranded in the United States by the German invasion of Poland in 1939 and spent the rest of his life at the University of California, Berkeley, where he trained generations of logicians. The quotes below are attributed to Alfred Tarski, organized by topic.
Alfred Tarski on Knowledge
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Attributed to Alfred Tarski:
“Decidability is the dream and rarely the reality of formal systems.”
Alfred Tarski on Truth
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Attributed to Alfred Tarski:
“Snow is white if and only if snow is white.”
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Attributed to Alfred Tarski:
“Truth in a formalized language can be defined by recursion on the structure of its sentences.”
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Attributed to Alfred Tarski:
“Logic must distinguish object language from metalanguage to escape the liar.”
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Attributed to Alfred Tarski:
“A theory may admit several non-isomorphic models, each as legitimate as the others.”